Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
Deniz Yonucu
(Newcastle University)
Vita Peacock (King's College London)
Rune Steenberg (Palacky University in Olomouc)
Send message to Convenors
- Chair:
-
Deniz Yonucu
(Newcastle University)
- Discussant:
-
Catarina Frois
(ISCTE-IUL)
- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- Lanyon Building (LAN), 01/002 CR & CC
- Sessions:
- Friday 29 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel explores the range of methodological challenges raised by the ubiquitization of surveillance technologies across the world. How should anthropology adapt to this large-scale socio-technical transformation in the service of political hope?
Long Abstract:
We have been witnessing an unprecedented development of new surveillance technologies going hand-in-hand with the ever-increasing digitalisation of the past decade. Most recently, the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated this transition, incentivising surveillance and paving the way for the use of experimental surveillance tools. Furthermore, the rise of 'participatory' surveillance enabled by the ubiquity of smartphones, fractures older analyses that view surveillance through the lens of clear power asymmetries, and opens up new questions around complicity and consent, as well as the potentials for subversion and resistance.
This panel explores the growing methodological challenges that this transformation raises for anthropology. We invite papers that consider these challenges conceptually or pragmatically. As anthropologists in the field of surveillance studies, we ask: how far can imported terms such as synopticism or dataveillance enable the work of ethnography, and how far can established frameworks be stretched? What innovative research tools can be used to study surveillance - whether technical applications or devices or new kinds of positionality? We also seek to consider fundamental questions about how this transformation alters the very conditions of anthropological knowledge production, foreclosing twentieth-century modalities and yielding novel ones, as well as posing new ethical dilemmas and existential risks.
In the light of this transformation the present becomes an important moment to refashion prevailing conditions in the service of political hope. How can ethnography amplify human efforts towards 'commoning' such as counter-surveillance, sousveillance, and digital counter-publics, that seek to disaggregate existing monopolies at this historical fork in the road?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 29 July, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
Digital smart technologies do not only transform lived experiences of surveillance. They also raise new questions and challenges with renewed urgency – both for fragile democracies and authoritarian regimes. This paper aims to address democratic (im)possibilities in light of this urgency and beyond.
Paper long abstract:
Data turn is a new buzzword in politics and in the anthropology of surveillance. Digital smart technologies are changing not only the lived experiences of surveillance, but also the normative and contradictory politics of, with, and in data. In the wake of multiple crises - especially the rise of authoritarian regimes in Europe and elsewhere, political upheavals and the Covid-19 pandemic - new questions and challenges have been raised with renewed urgency, both for fragile democracies and authoritarian regimes and for anthropological research. Drawing on my remote-ethnographic research on pandemic surveillance and digital proximity systems such as Hayat Eve Sığar (HES, “Life Fits into Home”) in Turkey, this paper aims to address this urgency for anthropology in relation to surveillance and data politics in the context of authoritarianism(s). These systems, as “algorithmic sociotechnical assemblages” (Liu & Graham 2021) raise a number of ethnographic questions related to the volatile entanglements between state power, algorithmic surveillance, digital practices, infrastructures and data politics, socio-technical imaginaries and authoritarian politics. Taking this as a starting point, I will address some methodological and conceptual questions: How can ethnography capture the democratic (im)possibilities “in the service of political hope”, as the call for this panel states it, for and within digital, datafied worlds? To what extend do the practices and politics of data and counter-data matter? What anthropologies do we need to bring to in face of this to this historical moment of seemingly multiple crises of democracies that requires more than critical and public voices?
Paper short abstract:
Based on fieldwork with NFT afficionados in London I argue that scholars should consider critically not only the impact of the outward-looking gaze on the observed – along with the power-imbalance it denotes – but also the impact of the surveying gaze on the person or group who is observing.
Paper long abstract:
Platforms used online for the exchange of decentralized digital assets regularly attract swindlers, hackers, and scammers of different kinds. For ‘honest’ traders, these individuals and organizations betray the Anracho-Libertarian spirit of collaborative experimentation that accompanied the open-source crypto ‘ecosystem’ in the previous decade. Naturally, then, members of the many crypto communities that coalesce online invest significant efforts in identifying and then excluding dishonest actors. This is done mainly by digitally tracking accounts on digital apps used heavily in this social environment for networking and communication. The ever-changing boundaries of online crypto communities thus become contingent on a continuous process of monitoring and surveillance that community members apply simultaneously and independently.
Based on my ongoing fieldwork with NFT afficionados in London, I argue that digital tracking in decentralized digital environments can be seen as a defensive tactic aimed at shielding the surveyors rather than exposing the surveyed. I suggest analytically that scholars should thus consider critically not only the impact of the outward-looking gaze on the observed – along with the power-imbalance this very act of observation denotes – but also the feedback impact of the surveying gaze on the person or group who is observing. This can open new ways to think not only of surveillance but also on postmodern ways of seeing, selfies, cancel culture, and other forms of self-objectification premised on the exclusion of unwanted others from the observing/objectifying frame.
Paper short abstract:
Drawing on the Daniel Trottier's notions of surveillance (2012) and “digital vigilantism” (2017), this paper proposes a methodological framework to reveal and describe the ingroup vigilance that intends to detect threats in international marriages.
Paper long abstract:
This article critically examines discourses on marriages between German men and women from Third countries that users articulate on one of the most popular Facebook groups of Russian-speaking migrants in Germany. Drawing on the Daniel Trottier's notions of surveillance (2012) and “digital vigilantism” (2017), a total of 114 wall posts and 24, 915 comments was subdivided into 5 large categories and qualitatively analyzed. The paper proposes a methodological framework to reveal and describe the ingroup vigilance that intends to detect threats in international marriages. The analysis shows that Facebook vigilant discourses are interlinked with micro level stereotypes both in Germany and in Russia as well as macro level regulations, where marriage is seen as a migration strategy and a misuse of intimate relationships. To a certain extent commentators function as guardians of the German migration system being simultaneously critical about Merkel’s migration policies. Attitudes towards migrant partners bear features of gender and nationalistic discrimination.
* Trottier, D. 2012. Social Media as Surveillance. Routledge: London and New York.
Trottier, D. 2017. Digital vigilantism as weaponisation of visibility. Philosophy & Technology, 30(1), 55–72.
Paper short abstract:
Drawing on fieldwork with users of digital health apps, this paper explores how anthropologists might engage in the study of surveillance where self-monitoring becomes a method of ethnography. Methodological and ethical commitments pose challenging questions to an ethnography of self-surveillance.
Paper long abstract:
Studying surveillance ethnographically could be said to involve methodological commitments that might not always sit comfortably with certain ethical orientations. Moral monitoring, as I make use of the term here, implies a right to privacy in monitorial contexts and the potential attainability of non-surveillance. Such an ethical orientation concerns not only the lives of research participants but also the ethnographer and extends well beyond both researcher and researched. Situated in the context of health surveillance in Britain and focussing on the use of digital health apps in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic, this paper asks questions about the significance of the ethnographer when practices of self-surveillance or self-monitoring become not only an object of ethnography but emerge as a method of ethnography. Ethnographic fieldwork relies intrinsically on bodies (our own body and the bodies of others) that make different modes of participation and observation possible, and their intersection and distinction. Ethnographic research on self-surveilling bodies might place reliance on a readiness on the part of the ethnographer to subject their own corporeal or mental life to digital self-monitoring and the collection of ‘personal data’. In the context of digital health and related fields, new ethical dilemmas can thus be seen to ensue from a methodological commitment to immerse ourselves in the worlds we study. Such a commitment at the heart of anthropology is one that poses important challenges to an ethical orientation towards ‘moral monitoring’ in states of surveillance.